surf Froebel Web

women took Kindergarten around the world

From her first meeting Froebel in 1848, she was a strong supporter of the cause.
Through her connections to the more liberal Weimar court and Thuringian nobility, as well as liberal urban educators and intellectuals in Dresden, Leipzig, Frankfurt and Berlin, she convinced skeptics and adherents alike that there was worth in his ideas.
Her book, Reminiscences of Fröbel presented kindergarten to a wider audience.

The advancement of kindergarten education was a major focus for the energies of female reformers in Germany during the 1848
revolution and the rest of the nineteenth century. Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), an educator and philosopher who had studied with
Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, formulated the educational philosophy of the kindergarten

Margarethe Meyer was born in Hamburg in 1833 to a prominent
family that encouraged her to pursue the arts and education. There
she was exposed as a teenager to the teachings of kindergarten
founder and advocate Friedrich Froebel. When Meyer came to
America she carried Froebel's ideas
with her.

Margarethe employed Froebel's philosophy while caring for her daughter, Agathe, and four neighbor children, leading them
in games and songs and group activities that channeled their energy while preparing them for school at the same time.
Other parents were so impressed at the results that they prevailed upon Schurz to help their children, so she
opened a small kindergarten, the first in the United States.

She later said that Froebel credited her with expressing his views better than his own
books had. Her work certainly gained an audience; kindergarten became an
accepted and integral part of American education and an accepted course of study
for elementary teachers.

The average poor child in 1860s St. Louis completed three years of school before being forced to begin work at age 10. Susan
Elizabeth Blow addressed that problem by offering education to children earlier. Applying Friedrich Froebel's theories, she opened the United States' first successful public kindergarten at St. Louis' Des Peres School in 1873. Blow taught children in the morning and teachers in the afternoon. By 1883 every St. Louis public school had a kindergarten, making the city a model for the nation. Devoting her life to early education, Susan Blow was instrumental in establishing kindergartens throughout America.

Children were encouraged to learn through guided exploration. Blow's classroom was visited by educators from all over the U.S. Her work changed education forever. Blow's book, Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, explains Froebel's creed "that man is a self-creative being . . . education shall encourage self expression . . . encouragement shall be given only to those modes of self-expression which are related to the values of human life . . ."

Susan Elizabeth Blow, born in 1843, was raised in an elegant home in Carondolet. Her education was typical for a young lady of the time. She attended school off and on, practiced reading by using the Bible and books from her father's library, tutored her younger sisters and brothers, spoke French with her governesses, and finally went east to a finishing school for girls. When her father was appointed Minister to Brazil immediately after the Civil War had Susan traveled with him. Then, with her family, she went to Europe. In Germany, she learned about the early childhood work of Friedrich Froebel, an educational reformer.

After a year of study under Froebel devotee Maria Kraus-Boelté in New York,
Blow opened the first public kindergarten in America at the Des Peres
School in St. Louis in September 1873. The next year she established a
training school for kindergarten teachers, and within a few years, St. Louis
had become the focal point of the U.S. kindergarten movement.

As a young woman she became interested in the work of
Friedrich Froebel in the education of young children and spent two years
studying his methods under his widow in Hamburg, Germany. Boelté then
went to London and taught in a kindergarten operated by one of Froebel's
pupils, Bertha Rongé. Boelté ran the London kindergarten by herself after
Rongé's return to Germany and added garden activities and nature study to
the course.

In 1867 she returned to Hamburg and taught in the Froebel Union training
school for kindergarten teachers. She subsequently opened a kindergarten
and training courses in Lübeck, Germany. In 1872, at the request of
Elizabeth Peabody, she came to the United States. On her arrival in New
York in September she established a kindergarten and mothers' classes in a
private school.

In 1859 Peabody learned of Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten work in
Germany, and the next year she opened in Boston the nation's first formal
kindergarten. She continued it until 1867, when she undertook a tour of
European kindergartens to learn more of Froebel's thought. Much of her
later writing concerned kindergarten education. Those titles include Moral
Culture of Infancy, and Kindergarten Guide (1863), Kindergarten
Culture (1870), The Kindergarten in Italy (1872), and Letters to
Kindergartners (1886). In 1873 she founded the Kindergarten
Messenger, of which she was editor during its two years of publication, and
in 1877 she organized the American Froebel Union, of which she was the
first president.